FTHCI 20112012-07-05 Volume 5 Issue 1

An emerging area of great impact and significance is the application of
pervasive computing technologies in healthcare. Pervasive healthcare refers to
the set of technologies designed to seamlessly integrate health education,
interventions, and monitoring technology into our everyday lives, regardless of
space and time. This approach can increase both the coverage and quality of
care. Over the last decade, pervasive computing solutions for healthcare have
become increasingly prevalent in both research and commercial efforts. This
survey analyzes a variety of research projects and commercial solutions devoted
to understanding, designing, and implementing pervasive healthcare applications
in support of preventive care, hospital care, and chronic care.
Taking into account the working conditions of clinicians and the needs of
patients, pervasive computing offers a variety of attractive solutions for many
of the challenges to care delivery in these domains. The work of clinicians is
intrinsically tied to the physical domain of the patient, not to digital
material available in computer systems; clinicians as well as other
non-clinical caregivers continually switch between different caregiving
contexts. Furthermore, their work is characterized by high mobility, ad hoc
collaboration, and interruptions. At the same time, patients and family members
frequently demonstrate poor adherence to both behavioral and pharmaceutical
interventions and experience inadequate communication with those providing
care. The use of health education to promote motivation, reinforcement, advice,
and tools for capturing and tracking health information supporting
self-monitoring can help patients to overcome these challenges. Pervasive
computing offers solutions for clinicians, patients, and a variety of other
caregivers to assist them with these problems including applications and
mechanisms to:

ease the recording, tracking, and monitoring of health information;

allow communication, collaboration, and coordination among the varied
stakeholders;

encourage clinical adherence and disease prevention;

support the nomadic work of clinicians and seamless integration of the
physical and digital worlds; and

enable the development of novel medical devices.
In this survey, we present an overview of the history of pervasive healthcare
research as a human-centered vision driven by a healthcare model that includes
preventive, hospital, and chronic care. We then summarize the research in this
space, outlining research challenges, current approaches, results, and trends.
Finally, we discuss future research directions as a springboard for new focus
in pervasive healthcare. This survey is based on analysis of the literature as
well as our own research experiences and those of many of our colleagues.This monograph presents an overview of the history of pervasive healthcare
research as a human-centered vision driven by a healthcare model that includes
preventive, hospital, and chronic care. It summarizes the research in this
space, outlining research challenges, current approaches, results, and trends.

Keywords: Assistive technologies

FTHCI 20112012-12-12 Volume 5 Issue 2

Foundational Issues in Touch-Surface Stroke Gesture Design -- An Integrative
Review synthesizes some of the foundational issues of human motor control
complexity, visual and auditory feedback, and memory and learning capacity
concerning gesture user interfaces.The potential for using stroke gestures to enter, retrieve and select
commands and text has been recently unleashed by the popularity of touchscreen
devices. This monograph provides a state-of-the-art integrative review of a
body of human-computer interaction research on stroke gestures. It begins with
an analysis of the design dimensions of stroke gestures as an interaction
medium. The analysis classifies gestures into analogue versus abstract
gestures, gestures for commands versus for symbols, gestures with different
orders of complexity, visual-spatial dependent and independent gestures, and
finger versus stylus drawn gestures. Gesture interfaces such as the iOS
interface, the Graffiti text entry method for Palm devices, marking menus, and
the SHARK/Shape Writer word-gesture keyboard, make different choices in this
multi-dimensional design space.
The main body of this work consists of reviewing and synthesizing some of
the foundational studies in the literature on stroke gesture interaction,
particularly those done by the authors in the last decade. The human
performance factors covered include motor control complexity, visual and
auditory feedback, and human memory capabilities in dealing with gestures.
Based on these foundational studies this review presents a set of design
principles for creating stroke gesture interfaces. These include making
gestures analogous to physical effects or cultural conventions, keeping
gestures simple and distinct, defining stroke gestures systematically, making
them self-revealing, supporting appropriate levels of chunking, and
facilitating progress from visually guided performance to recall-driven
performance. The overall theme is on making learning gestures easier while
designing for long-term efficiency. Important system implementation issues of
stroke gesture interfaces such as gesture recognition algorithms and gesture
design toolkits are also covered in this review. The monograph ends with a few
call-to-action research topics.

Physicians are confronted with increasingly complex patient histories based
on which they must make life-critical treatment decisions. At the same time,
clinical researchers are eager to study the growing databases of patient
histories to detect unknown patterns, ensure quality control, and discover
surprising outcomes. Designers of Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) have
great potential to apply innovative visual methods to support clinical
decision-making and research. This work surveys the state-of-the-art of
information visualization systems for exploring and querying EHRs, as described
in the scientific literature. We examine how systems differ in their features
and highlight how these differences are related to their design and the medical
scenarios they tackle. The systems are compared on a set of criteria: (1) data
types covered, (2) multivariate analysis support, (3) number of patient records
used (one or multiple), and (4) user intents addressed. Based on our survey and
evidence gained from evaluation studies, we believe that effective information
visualization can facilitate analysis of EHRs for patient treatment and
clinical research. Thus, we encourage the information visualization community
to study the application of their systems in health care. Our monograph is
written for both scientific researchers and designers of future user interfaces
for EHRs. We hope it will help them understand this vital domain and appreciate
the features and virtues of existing systems, so they can create still more
advanced systems. We identify potential future research topics in interactive
support for data abstraction, in systems for intermittent users, such as
patients, and in more detailed evaluations.This work surveys the state-of-the-art of information visualization systems
for exploring and querying Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs). It examines
how systems differ in their features and highlights how these differences are
related to their design and the medical scenarios that they tackle.

FTHCI 20112013-06-26 Volume 5 Issue 4

Experiments help to understand human-computer interaction and to
characterize the value of user interfaces. Yet, few intermediate guidelines
exist on how to design, run, and report experiments. The present monograph
presents such guidelines. We briefly argue why experiments are invaluable for
advancing human-computer interaction beyond technical innovation. We then
identify heuristics of doing good experiments, including how to build on
existing work in devising hypotheses and selecting measures; how to craft
challenging comparisons, rather than biased win-lose setups; how to design
experiments so as to rule out alternative explanations; how to provide evidence
for conclusions; and how to narrate findings. These heuristics are exemplified
by excellent experiments in human-computer interaction.Some Whys and Hows of Experiments in Human-Computer Interaction presents
guidelines on how to design, run, and report experiments in Human-Computer
Interaction. It identifies heuristics of doing good experiments, including how
to build on existing work in devising hypotheses and selecting measures; how to
craft challenging comparisons, rather than biased win-lose setups; how to
design experiments so as to rule out alternative explanations; how to provide
evidence for conclusions; and how to narrate findings.